Maths

Flightless Bird

David Farrier

Comedy, Flightless Bird, Documentary, Society & Culture, David Farrier

5 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2022

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s Flightless Bird, David Farrier sets out to understand why Americans say “math”, while New Zealand - and most of the rest of the world - says “maths”. He speaks to Dean Koorey about the mysteries of language, before stumbling into the depths of math/maths and the perils of the metric system. How many ounces in a pound? How many pounds are in a stone? And why is America stuck using the imperial system when the rest of the planet loves the sensible metric system? Farrier is shocked to find that NASA once lost a space probe thanks to a metric conversion disaster, and meets with aerospace engineer Omar Abed to get to the bottom of the mess.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm David Ferrier, a New Zealand are accidentally marooned in America, and I want to figure out what makes this country tick.
0:07.0	Now I like to think that in making this podcast, I'm slowly learning to understand the customs and ways of the American people.
0:14.0	And I am making progress.
0:15.8	I'm tipping correctly, and if I'm horribly injured I feel somewhat prepared for the trials and
0:20.2	tribulations of the health care system. I'm also getting used to getting
0:23.7	a side of fries with everything and the fact that you call fries fries and
0:28.0	not chips. However other things are more subtle and difficult to wrap my head around and I realize that decades in New Zealand
0:35.3	means that fitting into the United States is riddled with danger at every turn, something
0:40.5	that became painfully clear during the tipping episode of flightless bird.
0:44.4	Let's rewind to September 6th.
0:46.8	It was a Tuesday.
0:48.8	Good and I'm really happy with CEDAW to the 20.
0:51.5	This is a good place to be. 20 is a great place to do the maths.
0:55.4	Maths isn't my strong suit and thank God it's not some other amount.
1:00.0	Okay and also in America it's math singular.
1:04.4	What?
1:05.4	Oh God, what?
1:08.4	You do math.
1:09.4	Are you being serious?
1:11.4	No, I think this is probably just me being uneducated in general.
1:15.7	I think it's probably the same in New Zealand.
1:17.8	I would say I'm bad at maths, but it should be I'm bad at math.
	...

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